hello fellow wavers
Got a small problem when animating
The situation is like this: I got a head with two eyes( on 2 seperate layers) and two bones in.
I attach the bones to the head, and I attach the two eyes to the biggest of the two bones(headbone). If I rotated the headbone to the right both eyes follow perfectly, but if I rotate to the left, the right eye follows a bit too slow. Meaning that the right eye will come out of its socket if I rotate the biggest bone too far. There are weightmaps in the body, but they are all symmetrical, so that isn't cuasing any problems.
I noticed that the same thing happens when I rotate the headbone far down. The right eye goes thru the socket , the left eye stays in place.
The head is symmetrical, the eyes are mirrored. And I am clueless

Anyone knows what is going on?
TIA

BAROBA

kretin

07-26-2003, 02:29 AM

I'm not sure what's happening without playing with the scene, but one solution would be to include the eyes in the main model and animate them with bones...

LFGabel

07-26-2003, 02:40 AM

Place the eyes in the main body mesh and weight them 100% to the eye bones

Or follow Kretin's great cartoon eyes tutorial.

BAROBA

07-26-2003, 12:10 PM

Kretin, I did what you said, and the same thing happens.
Checked out your very nice tutorial on cartoon eyes, but didn't seem to help either.
So I returned back to my old scene and I uploaded that.
If any of you is so kind to take a look at it.
http://users.pandora.be/crimecity/images/Pigtest.zip
(only 14KB)
And the object is copyrighted by me, just for the record.

Robsi

07-26-2003, 02:04 PM

Hey Baroba,

your eyes are moving fine. If you have a better look you will see that your mesh is deforming bad.
You have some bad weightmaps. I fixed the eye area but there are still bad weightmaps (stray points) in this mesh.

Tip: use VertexPaint to test your weighmaps.

I will send you the new piggy to your privat adress.

Good luck, Robert

BAROBA

07-27-2003, 12:52 AM

Thanks Robert for looking at it :)
And now I am off to look what you did right and I did wrong :)
Thanks again :)

BAROBA

07-27-2003, 12:01 PM

I got it :)
The problem is that the weightmaps werent strong enough :)
I always assumed that a weightmap can go from -100 to 0 to 100.
Was I wrong :)
Apperently there are no limits, because I have painted my weightmaps with 10000 in order to get a right working weightmap.
:buttrock:

Robsi

07-27-2003, 04:58 PM

Hi Baroba,

the strenght of your weightmaps is not the culprit. I dont think its a good idea to set it to 10000??.

You have some really weird weightmaps in your setup.

1. Overlapping weights: -the eyes have some weightspoints of the head weightmap - front legs have have one on the opposite side.

2. Stray points on your Nose map, Back map and Backleg map. You can find them easy in VertexPaint and delete them. Go to the weight Tab, select the bones, use ctrl and left mouse to rotate the bones and if you find some stray point just delete them.

3. Bones setup in Layout: the mainreason for the funny(scary) right eye is the right shoulder bone, because it has no weightmap (the left one has). They need both the weightmap of the frontlegs. Without this map the right shoulder bone has too much influence to the right eye area of the head.

So your problem was a combination of all this points.
If you are fiddeling too much with different bone and weightmap setups its a good idea to clear the scene from time to time and start with a new one.
Last tip, rename your skelegons and give your weightmaps the same name. This will make things a lot easier. Your skelegons have all the same name "bone.000".

Regards, Robert

LFGabel

07-27-2003, 08:29 PM

Vertex paint is fairly good, but I still find it cumbersome.

Check out Lightwave 3d 7 Character Animation by Timothy Albee. He's got a good technique for setting up weights, although it can be a little tedious.

Try using his method with the plugins Mirror Weights and Blur Weights.

Find them on Flay.com

Robsi

07-27-2003, 09:40 PM

I like Timothy Albees method too (btw for me the best Lightwave book so far and I have all of them), but then I saw how Paul Mikulecky from Lost Pencil is using VertexPaint, so now I am using a combination of the two.

Usually I start with Albees method selecting points and give them weight (checking out not to go over 100%) and if I get troubles with some weightmaps I go to VertexPaint which is great for finding out errors and fix them very fast.

Ciao, Robert

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